


my skin doesn't fit me (not anymore)

by Ayotofu



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Government Experimentation, Human Experimentation, Mental Link, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Team as Family, and they all lowkey think theyre bad people, but they also love each other a lot???, everyone is very sad, this is super self-indulgent and i make no apologies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-25
Updated: 2018-03-25
Packaged: 2019-04-08 03:53:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14096646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ayotofu/pseuds/Ayotofu
Summary: The Lion towers over him and he can feel her, touching on the edges of his mind. She feels a little like Hunk, warm and deep, like a hot spring, but she also feels like Pidge, calm and smooth and curious, and also like Keith, like passion and fire and fury, and like more things than he can even begin to name. Lance has spent all of his life that he can remember feeling some sort of wrong, feeling something crawling under skin. But now, for the first time, despite the mud and the pain in his butt from a rough landing the cave had more-or-less collapsed and the ache in his hands that never leaves him, for the first time his skin fits his body, his eyes belong to him and him alone, his hair doesn’t feel like a wig. She’s his lion, and he’s supposed to be here, and for once he is something right.Hunk and Keith and Pidge (and Takashi Shirogane, but he’s trying not to think about the stranger in their midst) stand beside him, their mouths open in identical ‘O’s of surprise. He sees pictures, images that flash through his mind. Other Lions flying through space and a massive robot made up of all the Lions combined.“Voltron.”For once, everything was right.





	my skin doesn't fit me (not anymore)

**Author's Note:**

> Hey so uh. This is a thing now.
> 
> Come join me in my wildly self-indulgent journey to write about human experimentation and government shadiness while also keeping the space war thing and adding in a side of mental and physical bonds and families of choice and people who hate themselves almost as much as they love each other. And also they're all really touchy feely with each other. For Reasons.
> 
> It's a wip, so like. No guarantees about updates; I'm telling you up front. But here it is!! Whatever it is!!

When Shiro is strapped to a table and sedated and the room has emptied of Garrison personnel as he slips under, the last thing he sees is Keith Kogane standing over him, eyes blown wide and mouth hanging open.

“I--you--Shiro?” he says.

Shiro stares up at him. “You're dead,” Shiro says, words sticking to his tongue, and then he's out.

\---

When he wakes up, he's hot.

For the past year, the only times he'd ever been warm were when he was in the arena and the exertion of battle burned in his muscles and his lungs and his eyes. But their cells were cold metal, unforgiving as the vacuum of space, and he'd never once woken up warm.

Now, though, his shirt (soft and made of cotton and he’d forgotten how nice clothes can feel) sticks to his skin and he can feel a fine sheet of sweat on his upper lip and his lower back. He opens his eyes and has to squeeze them shut as the blinding light of the sun strikes his face. He smells sand and salt and sweat and he hears a crackle of bacon cooking and he’s free.

He breathes in through his nose, long and slow and deep, lets it out in a whoosh from his mouth. He tilts his head away from the light and opens his eyes again to see patchy wooden walls and a sand covered floor and a bookshelf full of textbooks and he jumps to his feet, heart hammering in his chest. None of this is familiar to him--not the warped floor or the sagging roof or the lumpy bed--and the unfamiliar is dangerous. He remembers being strapped down to a table and being sedated and he remembers hallucinating Keith Kogane being alive and well and coming to rescue him and now he was in some shack in the middle of the desert.

The world tilts under his feet and he puts his metal hand on the wall to steady himself. He needs to get out of here, but he can’t get his legs to cooperate. His stomach roils; acid burns his tongue. He lifts his leg, takes a step forward but his foot remains stuck to the ground. There is danger here, there is always danger, but finally he can run away but now he can’t run why can’t he run.

The door on the other side of the room creaks open and he jerks backward into the wall with a thud. A dark-skinned, heavy-set teenager stands in the doorway, holding a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon and staring at Shiro, a grown man huddled against the wall and terrified of a child.

“Oh, sorry,” the boy says, keeping his voice soft like Shiro’s some kind of wounded animal. Shiro would be offended if it didn’t sound so pleasant. “I didn’t mean to startle you. Just wanted to bring you breakfast.”

Shiro swallows. “Thanks,” he says. He takes a step forward, and then another, and another, and another, and then reaches to grab the plate with his flesh hand. “Where--where am I? Who--?”

“Oh, yeah, I’m Hunk, nice to meet you!” Hunk grins and thrusts his left hand out for a handshake. Shiro stares at it for a moment, and then at the plate in his left hand. Hunk follows Shiro’s gaze and a blossom of pink spreads across his face; he cringes, jerks his hand down and hugs his elbows across his chest.

Shiro clears his throat. “Uh, hi, I’m Sh--”

“You’re Takashi Shirogane, I know. You’re pretty famous,” Hunk says, words tripping over each other. He waves a hand at a dresser in the corner. “There’s clothes in there that should fit you. I mean, we changed your shirt for you because the other one was--was gross, but we didn’t want to do anything else while you were, y’know, unconscious, but yeah. Clothes. In there.” He turns to leave, then turns back around. “Oh! You wanted to know where you are. Uh, well, you’re on Earth, which you--you probably knew, but maybe not, because you weren’t here, like, two days ago. And uh, more specifically you’re in our, uh, desert shack. In the middle of the desert. In New Mexico. So uh. That’s where you are.”

Shiro blinks. “Thanks?”

“Yep, that’s--yeah. Your--your eggs are getting cold.” With that, Hunk turns and speed-walks out of the room.

Shiro picks up a piece of bacon and takes a bite. Maple and salt coat his tongue and he lets out a moan. Soon, he would have to investigate, figure out who these people were who had rescued him--he’s been saved, he can’t believe it--but for right now, he eats.

\---

Hunk walks from Shiro’s room straight into Keith.

The smaller boy tumbles over and Hunk catches him just before he hits the ground. “How is he?” Keith asks as he steadies himself.

“Okay-ish?” Hunk says. “I mean, he’s got a metal arm and stuff so he’s probably got some issues, but he’s not, like, catatonic or anything. He probably thinks I’m crazy, though.” Hunk rubs at the back of his neck.

“Yeah, you feel pretty…” Keith waves his hands up and down in front of his chest. “What happened?”

“I tried to, like, shake his hand? But I fucked it up? It was just--it was awkward.”

Keith frowns at him. “Sorry,” he says, “we probably could’ve explained that better. We’ll, uh, work on it. But he--he’s alright?”

Hunk takes a deep breath and looks Keith in the eyes. “Y’know, you could always talk to him. You said he recognized you, right? He’d probably be happy to see you.”

Keith shakes his head and the ice of Keith’s fear sits in Hunk’s spine. “He thinks I’m dead. How am I supposed to just--come back to life?” Keith sighs. “He’s got enough problems right now, anyway.”

“You’re not a problem, Keith,” Hunk says, and Keith is silent. Hunk grabs his shoulder and pulls him along. “C’mon, let’s get Lance and Pidge up for breakfast.”

“Yeah,” Keith says, and he grins up at Hunk before shrugging off his arm and running down the hall. “I call waking up Lance!”

Hunk squawks and races after him. “What? No! I got Pidge last time, it’s your turn! Keith!”

Keith laughs as he careens into their bedroom. “You snooze, you lose!”

“Keith!”

\---

Shiro’s hair hasn’t been washed in a long time; he doesn’t remember exactly how long, though. He doesn’t remember a lot of things. He doesn’t remember what happened to Matt and Sam Holt, but he knows they’re lost out in the blackness of space and that Colleen Holt is well and truly alone. He doesn’t remember who captured him, or how he escaped. He remembers purple. He remembers the burn in his lungs. He remembers that he remembered more when he woke up this morning but the images are fading now and he’s not sure if that’s good or bad.

He’s sure he reeks, but this doesn’t seem like the kind of place with running water for a shower, so he peels off the shirt Hunk and whoever else is here had given him and the slave suit he had on underneath it and pulls on a new, fresh t-shirt and pants and underwear (he never knew he could miss underwear so much) and he walks out of the room.

Quiet conversation seeps into the hall from a door a little up and to the right, and he takes slow steps, breathing deeply. It's okay. It's okay. He's safe, he's safe he's safe he's safe…

And then he's opening the door and he sees Keith Kogane.

Keith freezes, fork halfway to his mouth. A piece of egg falls back onto his plate. There are other people around him, Shiro knows, but all he can see is Keith, still wearing fingerless gloves and a biker jacket, though the haircut is new (is that--a mullet?), but it's Keith, right there in front of him, for the first time since the boy had vanished from Shiro’s house four years ago.

“Keith?” he says.

“Hi, Shiro,” Keith says, voice creaking.

“Wo-o-ow, isn't this wild!” The kid sitting next to Keith, a Latino with bright blue eyes, heaves an awkward laugh. “Keith and Takashi Shirogane, both actually alive! And here, in our little shack. Amazing!”

“Lance,” Hunk says from the kitchen counter.

“Haha, yeah, what a weird world we live in! Because we're all, like, alive and not dead.”

“Lance!”

“Haha yeah well I'll leave you crazy kids to catch up and go… somewhere else.” The kid--Lance--catapults himself out of his chair and grabs Hunk and the other person at the table who has been silent and drags them out of the room through the door Shiro had just come through. “Have fun!”

“You're… alive,” Shiro says. It's inadequate, but it's all he's got. The world feels like it's underwater; everything is garbled and blurry and Keith is alive and he's so happy he thinks his heart might burst and he hurts so much that Keith has been alive this whole time and never told him and there's a roaring in his ears and he isn't sure but he might barf or pass out. It's a toss up at this point.

“So are you,” Keith says. He scrapes his fork down his plate and won't meet Shiro's gaze.

“We looked for you,” Shiro says. Keith's eyes whip up to meet his. “Me and Mom. We never believed you ran away, no matter how much the police insisted. We hired a private investigator. She didn't find anything. She said you must have died in an accident or something. And Mom--she still looks for you. Every day. And you've--you've been here the whole time?”

Keith winced and dropped his eyes back to his plate again. “Not exactly.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means it's complicated and I don't wanna talk about it.”

“So that's it.” Shiro scoffs, mouth moving ahead of his brain. “All this time, everything we did to find you, all the worry and fear and stress, and you're just not going to say anything. Figures.” Why was he saying these things? He's happy that Keith's alive, he knows that it must have been more complicated than “Keith ran away,” he's known that since the day Keith vanished, but it is bile in his throat and his words and his head.

“I'm sorry,” he says.

“That's it?”

“Yeah.” Keith stands up and walks toward Shiro. “There's a shower at the end of the hall. It doesn't have any hot water, but there's shampoo and soap and--Lance has a bunch of weird moisturizer and face masks and stuff if--if you're into that.” Then he brushes past him and he's gone.

Shiro is alone.

\--

“I still say we should have dropped him off at a hospital or something,” Pidge says without looking up from her keyboard when Keith walks into the bedroom. Keith can feel the quiver of her concern in his temples, though, and he knows this is her own way of trying to make him feel better.

Lance cuffs her around the back of the head. “The Garrison had him strapped to a table and sedated; they wouldn’t have let a couple of nurses and a security guard stop them from taking him back. Putting him in a hospital would’ve been like handing him back into them ourselves.”

“So?”

Lance glares. “You don’t mean that.”

Pidge bites her lip and looks up at him. “I just--I’m worried about him being here. It’s--it’s a big risk, especially if the Garrison figures out what direction he left in last night. It was supposed to be a stealth mission. They weren’t supposed to know we’d been there but now they know we’re in the area and we still have to figure out Keith’s weird energy thing and he’s yelling at Keith and--” She cuts herself off. “I’m just worried.”

“I know,” says Lance. “Just try not to be such a jerk about it, all right?”

Pidge grumbles under her breath and goes back her computer.

Lance looks up at him. “Are you okay?”

Keith shrugs. “Ask me tomorrow and I’ll let you know.”

“Sorry.”

“Not your fault, just… a shitty situation all around. I’ll get over it.” Keith coughs into his fist and Lance reaches for his left hand while Pidge reaches for his right, tangling their fingers together for a moment before letting go. They both look back at Pidge’s screen, looking over the data from the Garrison base. Keith feels a deep ache in his right hand as Lance rubs his own with a wince. “How are your hands?”

Instead of replying, Lance grins, winks, and shoots a pair of finger guns at him. Keith rolls his eyes and the twinge in his hand deepens for a second before fading away.

“Oh!” Keith says after a beat of silence, slamming his fist into his hand. “I forgot about the handshake thing. Where’d Hunk scamper off to?”

“What handshake thing?” Pidge says.

“We need a quick refresher on handshakes.”

Lance blinks in surprise. “Um, okay. Well, he said something about a theory for the energy data and--”

Hunk’s shriek from across the hall drowns out whatever the rest of his statement would’ve been. “I’ve figured it out, guys! I know where we need to go!”

\--

They bring Shiro with them to the cave Hunk had picked out, not knowing what else to do with him. The man is quiet on the walk over there, mostly communicating with grunts and the occasional groan.

(“He’s like Max from the angry road movie!” Lance whispers to Pidge.

“For the last time, Lance, it’s Mad Max: Fury Road, not the angry road movie.”)

“I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before!” Hunk is saying for the third time. “It was staring me in the face the whole time. I mean, it was just so damn--”

“--obvious, yes, we get it Hunk.” Pidge rolls her eyes. “Let’s just go see this magical cave or whatever so we can finally get the hell out of Dodge and go somewhere with air conditioning.”

“Oh, Pidge,” Lance says, clutching his chest and wiping at a fake tear. “My sweet summer child. You are so optimistic about these things.”

Keith snorts next to her. “Knowing our luck, the next place won’t have indoor plumbing.”

As he says this, a bolt of anxiety jolts through her and she isn’t sure if it hers or Keith’s or maybe both because, somehow, they’ve forgotten about Shiro, trudging along behind them, listening to everything they say. They are letting too much slip to an unknown, an outsider, a variable. Pidge hates variables, hates what she can’t control, hates that they are giving this man (who had worked for the Garrison not too long ago) so much access to their lives, hates even more that she still cares about him even though it’s been years since she’s seen him and he probably doesn’t remember her name.

Keith is stiff next to her and she can feel his stomach churning as they keep pushing forward. Hunk glances back at them with a small frown, but Pidge waves him off. She doesn’t want to make Shiro any more suspicious than she’s sure he already is.

“So,” Shiro says behind her. She twitches. “Ah--you’re Pidge?”

She grunts. Two could play at the Mad Max game.

(Up ahead, Lance hears her and snorts behind his hand.)

“Uh, well, I’m Shiro. Which you probably already know.”

She grunts again. Beside her, Keith stares straight ahead, never flinching even as Shiro comes up on her other side.

“And I get that you don’t really trust me or want to tell me anything but… why did you bring me along at all?”

Pidge laughs. “It’s kind of like having a puppy in the house that isn’t potty-trained: If we left you to your own devices, we might come home to find you’d destroyed everything of value and taken a dump in the middle of the floor.”

“O-Okay.” Shiro lapses back into silence. Out of the corner of her eye, Pidge sees him stealing glances at Keith, who still won’t look at him. And she feels bad for whatever happened to him in space, she really does, but he’d hurt Keith that morning and Keith was hers and so he took precedence over any outsider, even if the outsider happened to be the last person to see her birth family alive. 

So when Shiro looks like he’s going to try to talk to Keith, mouth open and hand outstretched, she grabs Keith’s hand and pulls him forward.

“C’mon,” she says, dragging him behind her into the cave as he makes a soft noise of surprise, “let’s catch up with Lance and Hunk.”

If Keith and Shiro reconcile, it will be on Keith’s terms, not Shiro’s. Never Shiro’s. Not if Pidge has anything to say about it.

\--

She’s beautiful.

The Lion towers over him and he can feel her, touching on the edges of his mind. She feels a little like Hunk, warm and deep, like a hot spring, but she also feels like Pidge, calm and smooth and curious, and also like Keith, like passion and fire and fury, and like more things than he can even begin to name. Lance has spent all of his life that he can remember feeling some sort of wrong, feeling something crawling under skin, telling him _this isn’t right you aren’t right you’re a mistake._ But now, for the first time, despite the mud and the pain in his butt from a rough landing after the cave had more-or-less collapsed and the ache in his hands that never leaves him, for the first time his skin fits his body, his eyes belong to him and him alone, his hair doesn’t feel like a wig. She’s his lion, and he’s supposed to be here, and for once he is something right.

Hunk and Keith and Pidge (and Takashi Shirogane, but he’s trying not to think about the stranger in their midst) stand beside him, their mouths open in identical ‘O’s of surprise. He sees pictures, images that flash through his mind. Other Lions (color coded, apparently, which is. Interesting) flying through and a massive robot made up of all the Lions combined.

_“Voltron.”_

For once, everything was right.

**Author's Note:**

> hey yo come chat with me at ayotofu.tumblr.com


End file.
